Org-Roam Link to Files Internal/External to Dropbox

How To Requests
1

Hey all,

I just started to use Org-Roam to organize my DnD campaign, and I have fallen in love very quickly. Its perfect for how my brain works.

But, I’m realizing now that I want to be linking my roam documents against files on my computer. Specifically, I want to be able to search and link against my PDFs/Images/etc. like I would a roam doc.

I keep my org-roam directory on Dropbox for sync between my computers (that works great).

When linking to files, the following scenarios come up:

  1. I can also link against files that are kept on my Dropbox. This works, because all my computers share the same relative path via Dropbox.
  2. I can also link against files that are kept locally on my machine. This is harder because my computers do not share the same relative path. To the same point, I don’t want to be putting work files on my personal computer and vice-versa.

I figure I’m not the first person to tackle this problem. Has anyone been able to find a reasonable solution for doing this without mixing your computer’s files, and without putting everything on Dropbox?

2

Being a noob, I don’t have a beautiful canned response to your question. But I do have clarifying questions to ask.

You say “all your computers”. Do you have a personal computer and a work computer? Are there others involved?

Do you use org-roam for work? I assume that use case has nothing to do with DnD? Are your work org-roam documents totally disjoint from your personal org-roam documents, or is there overlap?

3

One is personal, and two more for work. I mentioned DnD because it’s what got me started, but I want to put my programming and work notes there too. There’s overlap. I would love to keep the same org roam database between my computers.

4

I personally have completely disjoint work and personal org-roams.

What do other people do? When I leave this job, I am not going to take all the notes I took about internal systems and customers and stuff with me. And I don’t even want to go through a combined org-roam DB and prune all that stuff out.

5

Hi @GeekTea,

It is a little difficult to understand what you would like to achieve.
Would you mind clarifying how you envision this idea?

Org-roam is designed to keep the cache DB file for each machine. In your case, each of your 3 machines will have a DB file.

In order for all your machines to have the “same roam database”, I think all of them would need to have the same files. If your machines have different files then it would be like this (regardless of the overlapping files):

Machine   # of Files   # of Files in DB
------   ------        -----
 A        100          100
 B        50           50  
 C        10           10
6

@gcoladon
This is where the encryption feature comes into play. Org-roam User Manual
As a result, I don’t show my notes to people, I just export subsections that are relevant to share. But, It’s all one database.

@nobiot
In the case you specified, I wish to have all my computers (A, B, and C) share the same files. But, for instance, If I have some document that does the following…

#+title: Some File Only on Comp A
* Some text describing my file/links and etc.

  Here is a normal org-link to my file
  [[~/some/dir/only/on/compA/file.pdf][My File Only on Comp A]]

This is what I would like to do, but if I switch to Comp B, I just have a broken path. I was thinking I’m not the only person who has wanted to do this, and if they had already figured out something cleaner.

7

What’s stopping you from doing this? An org file is a text file… So I see no issue. Sorry I am sure I’m missing some ideas; I don’t quite understand what your issue is…

Or is your issue a “broken path” in Comp B for a file that only exists in Comp A? If so, I have no idea…

1 Like
8

Thank you for your patience.

I figured out a system that works for me (and its quite underwhelming).

First, I store a lot more in my dropbox from here on out to keep a majority of my files on dropbox. This is the easiest fix for most of this issue.

Second, I let the links be broken. For instance, for my work, if I want to reference a work file, that is only valid on my work computer. If I want to access it. I will need to remotely login to that computer, and thats just fine.

Thank you for your help, perhaps I was asking help to a problem impossible to solve.

I’m new to this thread, is there a best practice for closing out these threads?

9

I may be wrong, and missing some functionality that exists here on Discourse, but I think the way you do that, is to just ignore the thread going forward. Of course, it’s possible someone will someday read the thread and have a new thought to contribute to it…